Some businesses, particularly banks, are often faced with a large amount of coin currency at the end of a business day, week or month which must be organized, counted and recorded. To hand count and record large amounts of coins of mixed denomimations requires diligent care and effort and demands much manpower time that might otherwise be available for more profitable and less tedious activity. To make counting of coins less laborious, machines have been developed which automatically sort by denomination a mixed group of coins. Since most countries have coin currency in which each denomination of coin has a different diameter, coin sorting machines have often utilized coin diameter as the coin characteristic to discriminate between denominations. Recently, however, several major countries have introduced into their currency new coins which have diameters similar to the diameters of other coin demoninations. Consequently, sorting by coin diameter is no longer practical for sorting the coin currency of these countries.